1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates in general to computers, and more particularly to method embodiments for prescribing copy services relationships for storage resources organized into a plurality of resource groups in a computing storage environment.
2. Description of the Related Art
Computers and computer systems are found in a variety of settings in today's society. Computing environments and networks may be found at home, at work, at school, in government, and in other settings. Computing environments increasingly store data in one or more storage environments, which in many cases are remote from the local interface presented to a user.
These computing storage environments may use many storage devices such as disk drives, often working in concert, to store, retrieve, and update a large body of data, which may then be provided to a host computer requesting or sending the data. In some cases, a number of data storage subsystems are collectively managed to provide storage for a number of host systems. Each host system provides one or more host logical partitions that are each capable of running an operating system that supports running one or more applications. Each host logical partition is allowed to access certain storage devices on the data storage subsystems. In this way, a general purpose computing environment allows the processing and storage resources of the configuration to be partitioned and assigned to various workloads associated with one or more applications. In some environments, a set of workloads may be associated with a specific tenant that is using a subset of the computing environment such that there may be multiple tenants that are concurrently running on various subsets within the environment. In this way, a general purpose multi-host system and multi-storage system computing environment can be configured to support multi-tenancy or multiple workloads.
In some situations, data storage is provided locally and also provided to a remote storage environment to enhance data reliability by providing redundancy. In these situations, several instances of data may be stored in multiple locations to provide for failsafe recovery. Storage environments such as network attached storage (NAS) and storage area networks (SAN) allow for these implementations, and for the implementation and maintenance of a larger amount of storage. SAN, NAS and similar systems are increasingly used for supplying a variety of services, such as email, database, applications, and other services. Data storage subsystems also are increasingly supporting the ability to perform outboard replication across SANs, LANs, and WANs to facilitate the replication of data for backup or mirroring purposes.